[CentOS] General CentOS 5.1 (or Gnome) instability?

Johnny Hughes johnny at centos.org
Thu Jun 5 14:23:55 UTC 2008


Alfred von Campe wrote:
> I've been a big fan of CentOS for a while, and didn't have many issues 
> with CentOS 4.X over the past few years.  However, since moving to 
> CentOS 5.1 a few weeks ago, I have received more problem reports from my 
> users than in the last year and a half on CentOS 4.X.  I've previously 
> reported the problem with gnome-terminal crashing (and since there is a 
> single gnome-terminal process by default all your terminal windows 
> disappear which makes this really painful), and now I'm getting multiple 
> reports of Gnome applets suddenly quitting.  Sometimes this includes the 
> entire screen "flashing" (probably a side effect of the "Show Desktop" 
> applet exiting).  I've also had reports of some third party tools like 
> SlickEdit misbehaving and/or crashing on CentOS 5.1.
> 
> Don't get me wrong; I'm not really complaining about CentOS.  I really 
> appreciate what the CentOS team does.  I am just wondering if anyone 
> else has seen these issues.  If it was just one or two users, I would 
> suspect the hardware or some configuration issues.  But these issues 
> started cropping up after I upgraded our existing systems to CentOS 
> 5.1.  The "upgrade" was a complete reinstall via a kickstart script (I 
> reformatted all partitions/LVs except for one), and all systems are 
> configured identically.  BTW, I'm using CentOS for our desktops as well 
> as our servers, and all these problems are really confined to the 
> desktop systems.  Almost everyone uses the default Gnome desktop.
> 
> So, does anyone else have the perception that CentOS 5.X (particularly 
> Gnome) is a little less stable than CentOS 4.X or is it just me?

I am not having any issues with CentOS 5 and Gnome ... I have been using 
it as my primary desktop since before the 5.0Beta stage.

I would initially start out but looking at any 3rd party installed products.

Also, if the hardware is the same, it might be something related to that 
motherboard chipset and centos-5 kernels.  I would see if you have the 
latest BIOS for the hardware as there may be APIC/ACPI issues that can 
effect kernel, udev, hald, etc.

I have zero issues here ... but I do NOT use yum-updated or any of its 
applets.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes

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